Use of Valgrind in Fedora packages

Week ago I fetched git repositories of all Fedora packages. This took a while as there are over 26 thousands of them. Now I am going through them and check/add AArch64 bits.

One of changes is Valgrind support. As there is only one architecture in Fedora which does not have Valgrind support I plan to submit pile of patches which will enable it for all except s390 (32-bit s/390 – we hope it will die sooner than later).

Usual piece of spec file looks like this:

%ifarch %{ix86} x86_64
BuildRequires: valgrind
%endif

My change will look like this:

%ifnarch s390
BuildRequires: valgrind
%endif

Sure, some maintainers do not like to look at their packages on architectures other than x86(-64) because they do not own hardware, do not like being hit by bugs in valgrind or have other excuses. In such situations I will be fine with note in spec file about it – like “cscppc” package maintainer did.

I am aware that some packages may fail due to bug in valgrind implementation on some secondary architecture. But then we can let know developers so it will get improved (while in same time package may get this build dependency disabled for a while).